‘A refugee is a human being like any other’ … Yusra Mardini.
Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

When, at the 2016 Rio Olympics, five women stepped on to the starting blocks for the first heat of the 100m butterfly, one stood out. While the others were identified with a name and their country’s flag, Y Mardini was identified by a white flag emblazoned with the Olympic rings. A beep, and they were curving into the blue pool. Mardini was slightly ahead for the first length, but lost momentum on the turn. She struggled to catch up to the Grenadian swimmer next to her – until the last few strokes, when, like her childhood hero Michael Phelps, she found a final burst of speed, and touched the wall first. The butterfly is a powerful, uncompromising stroke, and head-on pictures of Mardini in full flight only underline this: delicate face furious with focus, big shoulders lifting arms like wings. But what was more powerful, for millions watching, was the flag, and why she was competing under it: Mardini was swimming in her first Olympics as a member of the refugee team, travelling on a document that enabled her to go anywhere except her home country of Syria, from which she had literally swum away.

Butterfly tells the story, in Mardini’s own (ghostwritten) words, of how she got to that starting block. It is a story full of so much incident, put so plainly and at such a pace, that the reader begins to feel just as Mardini does about her late teens: “Things happen so fast there’s no time to reflect.”

The swimmer, now 21, was born in Damascus. Her father competed for the national swimming team until he had to do military service; all ambition was then transferred to his two daughters, Sara and Yusra. He threw them into pools when they were still tiny, fishing them out again under their mother’s horrified gaze. Later, he insisted they keep training even when Sara’s shoulders began to give under the strain, when Yusra had fainting spells, or ear infections, or, one day, when a weight-training machine, released unexpectedly by a team-mate, split her cheek open. “Dad wants us to be the best swimmers. The very best. On Earth. Ever,” writes Yusra, who, frightened, obeyed his autocratic requirements, swimming two hours a day under an unsmiling portrait of President Bashar al-Assad. Sara made the national team, and won a medal at the Pan-Arab Games; a picture is taken of her, with her medal – and Assad.

The Arab spring rumbles in the distance, comes closer and closer, until it spills into Syria. They wait for it to pass, “and while I wait, I swim,” Yusra writes. “Swimming is the best distraction.” But one day they turn into their street to find three tanks squatting at the end of it, and a soldier takes direct aim at their car. Not long afterwards, their father is arrested in a case of mistaken identity, hung upside down and beaten. Their home is flattened, and they are at the mercy of landlords who take advantage of their vulnerability to rack up rents. Mardini watches as the stadium where she trains is destroyed by a shell. Then one day, as she is swimming elsewhere, there is a sound of shattering glass, shouts – and in the suddenly clear water, an unexploded bomb. Sara already knows she must leave Syria; Yusra now realises it, too.

Mardini is shocked at how all she is – Damascene, swimmer, girl becoming woman – is collapsed into one word: refugee

So, leaving their mother and much younger sister in Damascus, they set out for Turkey and the Mediterranean. Their dinghy is turned back once by the Turkish coastguard. When they set off again the sea is no longer flat under the sun, but full of “churning teeth”. Fifteen minutes in, the engine fails. The boat is full and riding low so they throw anything out that they can. Then one of the men, a non-swimmer, bravely goes over the side, and hangs on. The dinghy lifts. Sara goes in, too, then Yusra. The sisters don’t physically pull it to shore, as has been widely reported – 10km (six miles), in high seas, with a heavy boat, is impossible even for two national-level swimmers – but they hold it steady, feeling for currents, keeping it on course, telling joje and smiling so as not to worry the six-year-old who is still on board. Night falls.

Yusra was the sister who captured the public imagination, but Sara is really the hero here – plucky, confident, charismatic, a natural leader given to reckless irreverence in the face of muscled, humourless men abusing their scraps of power. Yusra’s arc, though, is so improbable, so narratively neat, that it is not surprising there’s a film, directed by Stephen Daldry, already in the works. She has met Barack Obama, and the pope.

Film to follow teenager who crossed the Mediterranean and competed at Rio

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The account of the sisters’ travels after they land on Lesbos is a litany of faithless smugglers, prisons, border after border, trains that stop in the middle of a European nowhere while passengers wait, hearts in mouths, for the police to crash in – a litany predictable, not just from the recent refugee crisis but from film after book after memoir throughout the 20th century. They could be Armenians, or Poles, or Jews escaping Germany – except this time, Germany is where they’re heading (they even, disconcertingly, find themselves billeted in a camp where Rudolf Hess was once held). The weekend they arrive in Germany they are two of 20,000 similar arrivals.

Vastly grateful for individual kindnesses, Mardini is nevertheless shocked at the degree to which all that she is – Damascene, swimmer, girl becoming woman – is collapsed into one word: refugee. She fears that she is only competing at the Olympics out of pity. Yet she agrees to race in order to demonstrate her individuality – and that of all other refugees. To say, on bigger and bigger stages: “A refugee is a human being like any other.”

•Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Taleis published by 4th Estate. Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian, My Story of Rescue, Hope and Triumph is published by Bluebird. To order a copy for £16.14 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.